AUSTIN – The victor in Tuesday’s runoff elections is already known. The tea party has won big.

In virtually every Republican matchup, candidates have espoused the movement’s talking points, attended groups’ forums, and adopted their issues.

Even among the so-call establishment candidates, “there’s no doubt that their campaign rhetoric has been mimicking the tea partiers everywhere they can,” said Dallas tea party activist Ken Emanuelson.

GOP voters will choose nominees for several statewide offices Tuesday, and most will be heavily favored to win the fall general election. And from tough stances on illegal immigration, to capping spending and reducing taxes, the Republican candidates have drunk the tea.

“The debate has all been conducted in tea party territory,” said Rice University political science professor Mark P. Jones.

No one from the GOP is talking about reaching across any aisles or creating blue-ribbon committees.

“For movement conservatives, capitulation and compromise are seen as the same thing,” Jones said. “Being a pragmatic problem-solver who gets results and moves Texas forward is not an effective campaign message in today’s Texas Republican primary.”

Instead the message is to shut down the border, to stop or even impeach President Barack Obama and to fight for gun owners to be able to carry their weapons openly and anywhere.

Texas stands poised to be a contrast to other states’ GOP primaries this year. Elsewhere, establishment candidates have mostly triumphed.

For one thing, experts note, this election cycle has seen a large number of open statewide seats — for governor, attorney general, comptroller, agriculture commissioner and railroad commissioner. It’s much easier to win an open seat than to dislodge an incumbent.

The most passionate voters dominate the low-turnout primaries. GOP candidates fear allowing space to their right for a primary challenge much more than they do competition from Democrats in the fall. So with the state typically drawing 1.3 million GOP primary voters, a candidate virtually can be assured election with as few as 650,000 tea party supporters.

And hard-right conservative millionaires — such as oilman Tim Dunn of Midland, who’s given more than $2 million in this cycle — are willing to fund tea party candidates. In other states, candidates who don’t appeal to establishment conservatives have a harder time raising the money needed to compete.

Emanuelson said tea party organizers have worked hard at grass-roots campaigning — emails to friends, knocking on neighbors’ doors and getting like-minded acquaintances to the polls.

What they share is a concern that the state is spending too much, debt has ballooned, the federal government controls too much, Emanuelson said.

The notion that Texas has always been a conservative state is part of the Republican Party public relations material, he said. He said escalating local and state bond debt doesn’t look very conservative.

“Rhetoric-wise, we have a lot of red-meat conservatives, God and guns, but in terms of actual policies, we’re lagging behind,” Emanuelson said.

Such talk exasperates conservative officeholders who tout balanced budgets without tax increases. Bill Hammond, president of the Texas Association of Business, said the tea party’s fears are exaggerated and divorced from the state’s fiscal reality. He readily acknowledged that the tea party is winning the debate.

“Too many people in Texas have been convinced that the state government is like the federal government and is out of control. And the opposite is true,” Hammond said. “But people have said it long enough and loud enough that people have begun to believe it.”

He pointed out the state budget has inched up about 3 percent, despite enormous population growth. Nationally, Texas is 47th in per capita spending and 48th in taxation.

With GOP candidates making tea party pledges about holding the line on spending and reducing taxes, Hammond said he worries that Texas will fail to build the roads, find the water and improve the educational opportunities needed to keep pace.

“It bodes ill. ... It will be an incredible challenge to make the infrastructure investment that we need to keep Texas competitive,” he said.

Jason Stanford, a Democratic consultant, said the tea party mind-set of a profligate Texas “is not a view held by anyone who believes in the spherical nature of the planets.”

The truth is that “we’ve got roads going unpaved, schools going unfunded and water evaporating rapidly,” he said.

But instead of addressing those problems, the tea party slate and the Republican Party are moving so far to the right, “they’re leaving business behind,” Stanford said.

He pointed to the Republican agriculture commissioner candidates taking an anti-amnesty pledge on immigration, “even though that would kill the agricultural industry.”

He also cited the embrace of lieutenant governor candidate Dan Patrick and comptroller nominee Glenn Hegar to replace property taxes with consumer taxes.

“Their idea of getting rid of property taxes and replacing them with one big sales tax is not a pro-business position — just ask the retail industry,” said Stanford, who works for Hegar’s Democratic opponent, Mike Collier. “It’s by definition radical.”

What it means is that the political advantage of tea party dominance — at least longer term — accrues to the Democrats, he said.

“The movement conservatives will be more nakedly radical and hasten our transition to a swing state,” Stanford said.

Jones agreed that there is danger for Republicans. And it’s not just the business establishment that could be estranged.

“They can’t afford to alienate Hispanics and moderate Anglos, and they really run the risk of doing that if they veer too far to the right on many of these hot-button issues that are seen as too anti-women or anti-Hispanic,” Jones said.

Emanuelson said that despite the naysayers, the tea party represents the views of most Texans.

And part of what the tea party is trying to uproot are those entrenched interests, including some business concerns, that rely on the status quo and government spending.

Once the new slate of Republicans take office, Emanuelson said, “we’re going to make sure they make good on those promises.”

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